Are Gaming Laptops Worth It?

Gaming laptops have always had a stigma around them. Traditionally, like the PCs, laptops also first evolved as business machines – computers for those on the go.

However, times have changed. Now there are laptops for every purpose, with everything from the specifications to the designs.

Gaming laptops have been among the most marketed laptop classes, especially in recent years. Although anybody that is a hardcore gamer will immediately recommend that you skip laptops entirely if gaming is your thing, but are they right?

The Dark Past of “Gaming” Laptops

Gaming laptops have had a bad history. Manufacturers have always resorted to using the gaming tag with laptops to try and boost sales but didn’t do much to justify it.

Back then, there wasn’t a lot you could say to justify a purchase.

The presence of an integrated GPU from Nvidia or ATI was enough, to some. The issue was that with solid-state technologies not as advanced at the time, space was an important deciding factor in performance.

For the same price of a gaming laptop, you could build a formidable gaming PC that could get you decent performance, much better than the laptop could.

How Are Gaming Laptops now?

In recent years, as the fabrication processes have kept knocking off nanometres, gaming laptops have gotten better and better. CPUs and GPUs have gotten a lot better, and additionally, SSDs have almost become a standard, so we are getting a lot more “oomph” for the money, now.

Display panels and resolutions have also improved, and so have the refresh rates. Battery life at peak load isn’t as much better as you would like, but at least there’s some improvement from a few years ago.

Laptops on the whole, and gaming laptops specifically, have never been this worthy of a purchase ever before.

A significant new driving factor has been the rise of AMD. With some unexpected competition, we have been getting better and better offerings, especially with regards to gaming laptops.

Ryzen powered gaming laptops are all the rage right now and are helping improve the value for money performance quotient. In the past, AMD might have hurt the evolution of Gaming laptops due to the whole APU situation, where APU-based laptops were marketed as budget gaming laptops.